Andrew Sullivan and Susanna Cornett are in the two percent. So am I. (I wonder if bloggers are out of proportion to the general population?) I’m not sure what this means.

What bothers me about it is that there’s no way to do a controlled experiment. You can only take the test once.

What do all the math questions have to do with it? Why should we think you’d come up with a different answer if you just asked the final question up front?

Also, just to show how weird I really am, I didn’t think of a modified object. I thought of the object, and the modification, as separate entities (that’s what it actually asked for).

I think it’s because I don’t think in pictures. I think with words (one reason that I’m a natural speller).

Feynman tells the story of how he was trying to do some literal thought experiments to distinguish subjective from objective time. He would count in his head while doing various tasks, to see if his internal clock was accurate and consistent. But he discovered that he couldn’t talk while counting. He told a friend of his, and his friend said, “Why not? I can.”

And he demonstrated, jabbering away for a while, at the end of which he said, “I just got to number thirty.”

He figured out that when he counted in his head, he was subvocalizing, “one, two, three, …” and it was occupying the part of his brain that does speech, so he couldn’t say anything else. His friend, on the other hand, was watching an imaginary banner roll by in his mind, with the numbers on it.

I’m like Feynman was (in that regard, not the physics genius part…). I can’t talk and count to myself simultaneously. I also can’t visualize the banner, (or much of anything else) which is why I can’t be a visual artist–I am pretty much unable to retain images. I recognize things and people when I see them, but I have a great deal of difficulty visualizing them when they’re not present.